Your Prefabricated Life

Your life was made for you. I don't mean the sperm and egg creation. I don't mean the hopes and dreams of sometimes overbearing and generally well meaning parents. I mean your adult life in North America and many western countries, in that if you are sitting at a desk looking at a computer screen while being paid to work for a company or organization, you are inside the carefully crafted creation that was laid out for you. 

Even if you are not an office drone (and bless you for figuring out how not to do that), certain things have been crafted with your schedule in mind. Regardless of the hours you work, you work. Afterwards, you are tired and distracted and want easier, faster, convenient. They knew that. They made sure of that. The worst part is, 'they' are doing it to themselves too...read on and you'll see what I mean.

We are all trying to get off the wheel and as soon as we think about it, another carrot gets added to the stick and so we think, well hey if I keep running I will get 2 carrots! But the carrots are plastic, the wheel is a desk with a computer and the chain that holds you to the wheel is invisible to your own eyes; it is made up of societal pressure, familial obligations, cultural norms, security needs and the exploitation of your basic physiology that takes place without your notice and agreement. You're the bunny in this scenario. A social bunny who needs its bunny friends. I like metaphors, so sue me.

The way I see it, unless you follow your dream at a very young age and reach out and take exactly what you need from the world, have a support system to pay your way until it works out, you will end up in an office/wheel and even if you have all of those things, the world will keep tilting you like a handheld maze game until you end up in an office/wheel anyways. 

And then you will slowly work to tilt the whole thing back a millimeter at a time to try to reach the cheese. That is only if you are ambitious and smart and hardworking. The rest of you? Good luck, Chuck... And we buy into the idea that there is no other way (literally and figuratively) and some of us praise a god or system of gods that are believed to be judging us, all to keep ourselves from sitting down, taking a time out, reassessing our lives, the purpose we hold dear and making real change. 

But you better pray to whatever god you believe in if you really do make the change. One rabbit jumps off and all the other rabbits will stare fiercely and cast the lone one out so it is not in the group, therefore making it uncomfortable, not supported by a structure of friendship and meaningful relationships. The pain of that pulls the rabbit back onto the wheel on its own, so it thinks it was its own idea. BAM!  The security is cruel and the system is self correcting. You are rewarded for your compliance.

The hierarchy that created all of this for you with mass marketing and plastic toys aimed at your children is amazingly linear..they cannot escape either. Those that will market to us for their own carrots are in offices, on their own wheels....and when they get off work that day, they too will buy the fast, convenient, easy item to fill in what is missing. Its a carrot shaped peg for a Grand Canyon sized hole, though. No satisfaction can ever be large enough to make up for selling yourself and so you will do it again, thinking you can buy enough carrots.

I feel like I have known all of this for a decade and at the same time like I am discovering the matrix.

You have to agree to this. You have to be complicit in the arrangement. That is how it works. There is no success to the prefabricated world without you as a participant/observer. There is no them without us and no us without each individual. Your complicity is the most unusual part. You have to be in on the illusion, and most of us are doing it without even realizing it. This is the devil of comfort, but that is a talk for another day.

I don't expect this to blow your mind. I really don't. The truth is, that you can read English and so you know that a great many things are crafted to suggest certain paths to you in the maze of life. That is knowledge you already have. What you do with this knowledge, dear bunnies, that is a whole other story.